Granddaughter Clarke, 9, shows off her T-shirt, definitely a match for her current condition.
While we were all dealing with Tropical Storm Helene, my Greenville daughter, Liz, decided getting out of that town for a bit made sense. Their area was in as big a mess as ours. In fact on that Friday, they could not get out of their neighborhood. One of their friends on their street is a doctor who was called in for an emergency that Friday morning, but he couldn't get out of the neighborhood. Meanwhile, the hospital called right back and said, "Never mind!" They explained their back-up generator had failed, so they were having to use battery-operated equipment and were moving emergencies elsewhere.
As soon as Liz and family realized it could be awhile to dig them out and to solve their power issues, they decided a visit to friends in Summerville was in order, especially since husband Vince was going to be traveling on business that first week after the storm. They managed to get to their friends and enjoyed a couple of days of respite. (It seems so weird to consider heading toward Charleston in a hurricane, when you think about the many times folks from Charleston have had to evacuate our way.)
And then trouble struck. Granddaughters Pearce, 11, and Clarke, 9, were enjoying riding bikes with "cousins" Zoey and Riley, when Clarke fell and somehow got her leg caught between the handlebars and the bike frame.
Knowing her child's proclivity toward the dramatic, everyone first brushed off Clarke's pain as just that. But when she continued to complain, they gave in and headed to the emergency room.
When they got to the emergency room, they found that Clarke had broken her tibia and fibula -- big time. After some consultation the doctors decided they could set the leg by doing an X-ray, setting, another X-ray, more setting, until they got it right. Clarke, of course, had to be sedated to allow that to happen. (She woke up in the middle, so that was extra traumatic.) The result was a straight-legged cast from toe to hip.
My daughter (handling this alone, remember) was wrung out by the time it was over. She called us the next day (at Cat's house, since we still had no power), and was finally able to have a let-down moment, since she didn't want Clarke to see her cry over the situation. The friends had school the next day (Charleston didn't get the hurricane this time), and another set of friends were able to take Pearce so Liz could concentrate on Clarke. They came home from the hospital with a wheelchair, a walker and crutches.
Those first couple of days Clarke was on a rotation of OxyContin, Tylenol and ibuprofen, so she mostly slept. Liz said it took them a while to get ahead of the pain, so Clarke continued to have bouts of great discomfort.
Daughter Cat, granddaughter Payton and I decided we'd go up to help out once they got back to Greenville. We headed up that next Monday. When we arrived, Clarke was totally zonked out, but she had a doctor's appointment. The good news is that one of their friends is a pediatric orthopedic surgeon. He checked her out and was happy with how things were going.
Payton tried to play games with Clarke (and Pearce). School didn't resume until Wednesday for Pearce, and Clarke was going to wait until after her next doctor visit, in which Dr. Lazarus had said he might cut her cast down, so she could bend her knee, at least.
But by the second day we were there, Clarke was making great strides. Getting her in and out of a car continued to be an issue, but Clarke quickly figured out how to move about on the walker, with the crutches and in the wheelchair. (She's still a little embarrassed by the walker - why don't they make cute ones for kids?)
Maybe my favorite moment was when Clarke opened a gift from an as-yet unknown giver. It's a great T-shirt for Halloween - a black tee with a skeleton on the front with the lower leg broken from the rest. It says, "Oh, snap!"
In any event, Clarke is "snapping" back very quickly.
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